Virtual reality (VR) video has recently emerged as a creative art form to expand an ability of a user to interact with video, such as to look at different portions of a virtual reality scene output through rendering of the VR video. The expanded abilities usable to interact with VR video, however, limits an ability of users to otherwise interact with each other. Thus, the advantages of VR video in expanded user interaction with the VR video may limit and interfere with other interactions by the user “outside” of this view, such as to communicate with other users.
As part of the process to create VR video, for instance, creative professionals wish to engage in a collaborative review to exchange feedback, e.g., to specify inclusion and modification of particular objects, dialog, and so forth. However, conventional techniques used to support collaborative review and feedback employed for conventional two-dimensional video face numerous challenges and thus are unsuitable for use with VR video. This is because the expanded techniques used to interact with VR video itself limit an ability of users to interact otherwise with each other “outside” of a view of the VR video, even when in the same room. The users, for instance, may wear corresponding head-mounted VR devices to view VR video. As a result, these users are each limited to respective isolated views of the VR video that may differ and are not easily shared with each other.
In one conventional collaboration example used to address this isolation, multiple VR devices share a single view of VR video that is controlled by one of the VR devices. This shared view, however, typically causes nausea to the VR devices that do not control this view and thus is typically avoided for use in collaborative review and feedback of VR video. For example, a source user may control navigation with respect to a VR video through head movement detected by a respective source VR device. This VR video, when viewed by other users of other VR devices, however, may cause nausea. This is because the output of the VR video does not follow head movement of these other users, but rather is controlled by the source user. Thus, this conventional example limits an amount of time the other users can view an output of the VR video as controlled by the source user without feeling sick. Consequently, VR video presents numerous challenges not encountered as part of collaborative review of other types of digital content, such as two-dimensional video.
Further conventional techniques and systems used to share the VR video typically involve loading the VR video onto storage directly accessible to the VR device or uploading the VR video to a remote database that is accessible to the VR device via the Internet. These conventional techniques and systems, for instance, may involve posting to the remote database, which may make it difficult to remain private. Conventional techniques and systems that support local storage require downloading the video and then opening a player application, which may also require manual entry of a uniform resource locator (URL) and thus is frustrating and prone to error. Further, these conventional techniques are modal and thus require users to navigate away from a user interface used to create and edit the VR video to share this content with other devices, which is also frustrating and inefficient.